I got some exam / assignment results yesterday. Some were really good, and some were not.
But before I talk about that, here's a clip from the Matrix.
He is the one
Before you get excited, I don't think I am the one. But if you look at what happens 1 minute 4 in, to me that's what learning is. You've been fighting with something and staring and staring at it for ages, and then suddenly you get an insight, and it starts to make sense.
I'm currently sitting in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, a place I spend most of my time these days. The year is 2018. In 1986 I got kicked out of this exact same place by Security. I was at school, doing my A Levels, less than a mile away and I came in for a look round, with my friend Andrew. The fact that we were wearing ties should have been a clue that we weren't students. Anyway, they didn't have electronic barriers and keycards then, and I can always remember what the Security Man said to me. He said 'Get out, you don't belong'.
I had a similar feeling of not belonging when I missed the UCAS deadline in February 2016, and the Admissions Team here were doubtful about letting me in, because my A Levels were so long ago. They sat on my application for about 2 months without giving me an answer, and they wanted me to do a Foundation Year Degree instead. Eventually because I kept pestering them, they offered me a 15 minute Skype interview, to shut me up, but that just annoyed me and I said 'Look, I want to do Linguistics, and I live a mile away. Either I'm worth seeing in person, or I'm not. I want to come in and speak to someone in person, and if I'm going to get turned down, at least turn me down in person'. And that could have gone either way, they could have said 'Get lost', but they saw me, and now I'm here.
Another memory from school. I used to do Art but I was rubbish at it, too rubbish to even do O Level. I once drew a picture of a tree and my Art Teacher Mr Gedling said to me 'I've been an Art Teacher for 30 years and that's the worst picture of a tree I've ever seen'.
The third memory from school. When I was doing 'O' Level Maths I really struggled with calculus, and by the May half term before the exam I really wasn't getting it, so I brought home a load of past papers and spent most of half term at the kitchen table, doing them over and over again. And at some point I understood it. I kept looking and not understanding, but then somewhere in there, I could see the patterns and the rules.
Revising for Syntax a few weeks ago was a lot like trying to understand Calculus. All I could see was complexity. But I kept staring and staring, and I thought, if even two years olds can master how to put a sentence together, the rules must be in there somewhere. And after staring for days and days it started to look a lot simpler. Things started to connect into patterns and rules and I started to see the structure. It sort of clicked. It was the best part of learning, it was the 'Joy of Finding Things out'.
Einstein, who could see patterns no-one else could in the Universe, said that 'If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough'. And with Syntax that became my goal. To understand it well enough to be able to explain it. Syntax is also about drawing trees. And at first my trees were as bad as my terrible Art Tree from 1983. But the more I practised, the easier they got. And I realised Mr Gedling, that when you taught me in 1983 it wasn't that I couldn't draw trees, it was that I hadn't found the right kind of tree to draw yet.
And so I did well in my Syntax exam. I got over 90%. For a while at least, I was like Neo at the end of the Matrix. I didn't just see the Matrix, I saw the structure behind it. And when I feel like that, I know what I'm here for, and I belong. The problem was, I should have left it longer after getting the good result to look at my other ones, because as near to the top of the class as I was in Syntax, well that was as close to the bottom as I was in some of my others. So overall, I am fairly average, and therefore not 'the One'.
Sometimes, I wonder why I'm here. I wonder if University is a colossal waste of time and money, and whether I'm just going to wind up penniless and under a mountain of debt in the future, for no reason. And that's pretty much how I feel when I get bad results. But when I stare and stare at the structure of things, and it starts to make sense, I know what I'm here for.
There's no consistency in me. I feel both those things almost every day. Both that I'm doing the work I was born to do, and also that I'm wasting my time. Sometimes I think both those things in the same minute.
I'm capable of drawing the best trees and the worst. I don't belong and then I do. I fail and fail and then I pass, and then I fail some more. I stare and stare at complexity with no idea of what I'm doing, and then occasionally I get a snapshot of the simplicity inside. I suppose that's what Education is, and also Life too.
